In the mule-spinning room at the Chace Cotton Mill in Burlington, (from left) "Back-roping boys" Leopold Daigneau and Arsene Lussier were photographed by Hine in 1909.

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Morris Levine stands on a snowy downtown Burlington street corner selling the newspapers tucked under his arm in a black-and-white image taken on Dec.17, 1916. The little boy was only 11 then, but had already been on the job for five years, earning 30 cents a day. Except Sundays, when his pay went up to 50 cents.

This youngster's situation is known because the man behind the camera was investigative photojournalist Lewis Hine. He spent a decade — 1908 through 1918 — traveling the country to document children at work in an era before there were any laws to protect them.

His mission, on behalf of the National Child Labor Committee, was clear to him: "Photography can light up darkness and expose ignorance," Hine once said.

"He used his pictures to change opinions," said Joseph Manning, a Massachusetts researcher who has been focused on Hine's oeuvre for more than five years.

The U.S. Library of Congress has more than 5,000 gelatin silver prints and glass negatives, including those Hine snapped in several trips to the Green Mountain State. (Burlington's Fleming Museum owns about 100.)

From the Queen City to Rutland to Barre to Bennington, Hine's many subjects were tykes from poor families who had no alternative to toiling in hazardous surroundings at textile mills, lumberyards and marble quarries.

Manning has traced what happened to 250 of those kids. For example, it took him just two hours to discover all sorts of facts about Morris Levine, a resident of 212 Park St. during the early 20th century.

The newsboy spoke Yiddish, had 11 brothers and sisters, attended Burlington High School, became a Merchant Marine at 16, worked as a bellhop at the Hotel Vermont, and married a French-Canadian girl from Charlotte who gave birth to their six children.

Until his death in 1996, Morris Levine prospered. Others were not so fortunate. Addie Card, for example, never quite escaped the hardscrabble existence that Hine captured in an iconic 1910 photo at the North Pownal cotton mill where she was employed as a spinner.

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He described the 12-year-old as looking "anemic." Like many of the children Hine met, the slip of a girl was barefoot on the factory floor.

When 17 well-shod students from St. Francis Xavier School toured the nearby Heritage Winooski Mill Museum recently, some of them — all Addie's age — were startled by her lack of footwear in a framed photograph displayed along with more than a dozen of Hine's prints depicting local children.

"She has no shoes and her clothing is dirty," observed Christian Brunelle of Winooski.

"The children in those days often had to save their only pair of shoes for church on Sunday," said Laura Krawitt, the museum director.

"She looks tired," Brunelle concluded, with a final glance at Addie.

Ben McCormick, from Colchester, added: "It's amazing how the working conditions were so bad."

"I wouldn't do it," said Jade Garrow of Milton. "It's dangerous."

The empathy of these seventh graders, accompanied by teacher Jeff Badillo, was evident. "This is part of an inter-curricular study about work, immigration and Winooski history," he said.

For the course, they've been reading "Counting on Grace," a 2006 young adult novel that fictionalizes the experience of Addie Card. The New York City-based author, Elizabeth Winthrop, decided to write her book after she saw the haunting Hine photo in a Bennington museum.

She hired Manning to track down more information about the waif. He started his quest by trekking throughout the Northeast to inspect death records and, in a matter of weeks, interviewing Addie's descendants.

Hine had mistakenly referred to her as Addie Laird. That error was not yet corrected when, in 1998, the U.S. Postal Service issued a 32-cent stamp with the iconic 1910 North Pownal shot to mark what would have been her 100th birthday. (Winthrop uncovered the mix-up in 2005.) Addie had died five years before the stamp came out, at age 94, never having seen the picture that made her famous.

The St. Francis Xavier adolescents wondered why, unaware that so many of the child laborers Hine encountered were illiterate. They probably never saw any newspapers and magazines at the time that might have carried his photographs. Also, a number of them spoke little or no English, as successive waves of immigrants arrived in New England and found menial jobs during the Industrial Revolution.

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Armand Rathe, 15, appears in a picture taken near his workplace, Burlington's Chace Mill. Hine apparently could not decipher the teen's thick Quebecois accent and jotted down what sounded like "Herman Rette" as his name.

Although Rathe's early years were difficult, he eventually became a successful businessman and eight-term mayor of Winooski in the 1950s, but apparently never saw how Hine had immortalized him.

Not all of les miserables would fare as well. They sacrificed their childhoods to amass wealth for businesses through long hours picking cotton, tobacco, berries or beets, shucking oysters, wrapping cigars, mining coal, sewing garments and canning sardines. Many of the diminutive mill workers in the Burlington area lived in squalid tenement apartments with their enormous families or at crowded boarding houses like the one that much later was replaced by the Peking Duck restaurant on Winooski's West Canal Street.

The wages were abominable, so injury, disease and an early grave might be their only final reward. One of Hine's photos shows Luther Watson, a 14-year-old whose right arm had been cut off by a saw at a Kentucky box factory in 1907.

This was truly a lost generation but not without sociological redemption.

"They look at him with such clear-eyed expressions," said Kirsten Hoving, a Middlebury College professor who teaches the history of photography. "Hine showed them less as victims than as dignified human beings in undignified settings."

The National Child Labor Committee, a private, nonprofit organization, was dedicated to stopping exploitation of people younger than 16 by what Hine deemed "monotonous drudgery in dusty factories."

If unable to determine the children's ages, according to the Winooski museum's Laura Krawitt, Hine guessed their heights by virtue of the buttons he had already measured on his jacket. A particularly heartbreaking 1908 notation about an unidentified petite spinner at a North Carolina cotton mill: "She was 51 inches high. Has been in the mill one year. Sometimes works at night. Runs 4 sides — 48 cents a day. When asked how old she was, she hesitated, then said, 'I don't remember,' then added confidentially, 'I'm not old enough to work, but do just the same.'"

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Manning points out that Hine lugged a 50-pound Graflex box camera from state to state, town to town, factory to factory. Sometimes, the task required him to tell wary managers that his goal was to photograph the machines, posing a child there to theoretically demonstrate the scale of the device. In the South, he'd pretend to be a Bible salesman. Or, if all else failed, the young laborers could be found outside in groups during the noon lunch hour.

With this clandestine process, Hine was able to create an important testament to needless suffering and deprivation. "His purpose wasn't to pity them," Manning contended. "He respected the work they were doing. I see it as a one huge album of the American family."

The Addie Card photo surfaced again in a Reebok ad condemning child labor, a company that has been accused of manufacturing its sneakers in sweatshops, mostly in China, that allegedly employ very young kids. (Today, 120 million children between the ages of five and 15 work full-time in developing countries, 61 percent of them in Asia.)

This irony may not have been lost on the Vermont students, some sporting popular brand-name running shoes at the Winooski museum. "We talk in class about what labor means," teacher Jeff Badillo noted, "and where our consumer goods come from today."

Hine's output shocked the conscience of America and contributed to passage of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. By then, he branched out to fashion dramatic images of immigrants from all over the globe transitioning through Ellis Island; chronicle Red Cross relief efforts in Europe before and after World War I; capture construction of New York's Empire State Building from 1930 to 1932; and become chief photographer in 1936 for the Works Progress Administration, a massive national employment program to lift the country out of the Great Depression.

His artistry, arguably, is the story of us. "Hine's work really stands for something," Kirsten Hoving suggested. "It's about what he considered justice."

Yet, this was a heroic advocate for social change that time forgot. Hine died impoverished in November 1940, at age 66, the visual legacy of a remarkable career no longer valued by the society he helped improve.

But his reputation has since enjoyed a posthumous redemption, perhaps offering inspiration to others who hope to make a difference: "I wanted to show the things that had to be corrected," Hine once explained. "I wanted to show the things that had to be appreciated."